Because before I had a full-time job I was always working part-time to earn enough cash to spend frivolously including a morning paper-round, helping the milkman deliver (before I did my paper-round), plasterers’ labourer and pet food shelf stacker for the local Co-Op, which were all fun, interesting and I have some stories to tell but I guess you are going to have to wait for my memoirs to be finished/published to read about those exploits.

My first paying full-time job was as a Carpenter & Joiner for a company that now no longer exists called Pitcher Bros (Leicester) Ltd. I never checked but I am assuming that it had to have (Leicester) in the company title because there was another company called Pitcher Bros at the time, I’ve searched the internet and can find no reference to any other company of that name in the UK, there is however a Pitcher Bros based in Seattle who seem to have a thriving business selling carpets, maybe they insisted (Leicester) was included, who knows!?

Anyway, I started work on the morning of my sixteenth birthday literally hours after I was legally able to hold a full-time job, I woke up early, got on my bicycle and cycled three and a half miles to be present and ready to start at 7:30am.

Pitcher Bros were based in the Victorian Co-Op Dairy Stables – which was quite an unusual layout, with garages and stores for carts and equipment down stairs and a huge ramp that went up to the horses stables on the first floor and the third floor was for the storage of feed and hay that could be fed down through holes above each stable to the hungry horses below!

My work bench was up the ramp on the first floor and the people I worked with were some of the most interesting characters I have ever met, including just as a taster, a one-eyed man with a vegetarian dog, a man who was bent double with arthritis but who still shovelled/carried tonnes of bricks, mortar and building materials every day, a man whose name wasn’t Harry but everyone called him Harry because he had a terrible memory and called everyone else Harry, a man who was a Karate enthusiast whose special/preferred move was a fistless punch, using the stumps of his severed fingers which he had lost in a work related accident and a man who added the words ski and lutum to almost every sentence and is responsible for creating my longest ever nickname – Phillipobonjovihedgehoggerlutumheadfroggerlutumhopski.

I could go on……no really I could but that will be a future blog post I think.